Archive for the ‘Days 1-100’ Category

I was totally going to wait and post this later this week because it’s going to be insane at work (2 people will be gone, so I’m working 6 8 hour days in a row ), but I’m so pumped about this that I couldn’t resist going ahead and posting it!

You’re probably looking at that title and thinking, “See You? What the heck is that song?” Well that’s because it’s a never been released song by my sister and yours truly! You see, when my sister and I were younger (I’m thinking like 4th grade for me and 6th for Kat?? idk… what do you think, Katherine?) we used to spend hours rocking out with our Beanie Babies in the roles of Hanson, Spice Girls, or any other group we were interested in at the time, but we also wrote our own original songs! We called ourselves AK Original which stood for…. Anna Katherine Original, duh! I don’t think we ever named this song (or if we did I don’t remember it…), but it was one of our favorites, along with another one I’ll call Swimming… Kat you know what I’m talking about! But anyways, I decided to call this one See You. We only ever came up with one verse (the last one in the recording) a chorus and a part I’m calling the bridge when we were younger, so I quickly made up two more verses. The words are very simple and somewhat juvenile, but we were kids when we started this, so I just went with it and I wrote them in like 20 min. Then I just came up with some simple backing chords on ukulele! The uke “solo” at the beginning and after the bridge were already part of the original song so many years ago… we just used to sing it haha! At any rate, I recorded the ukulele parts, then the melody, and finally the harmony! Here it is with words below just to clarify! Keep in mind the final verse is the one we wrote forever ago!

So… I’m now 2 days behind because I came home after work last night and promptly fell asleep!! I woke up about 2 hours later and just moved from my couch to the bed and slept until this morning. I was so tired from work! But anyways, I had today off, so I’m going to try and get at least 2 posts in between packing boxes in preparation for my move next month…

So, I originally decided to do this project for today because I thought it wouldn’t take very long… boy was I wrong about that! But, I’ll get more into what a did in a minute. As you all know, my major inspiration for this 365 project was Skull-A-Day. I decided to pay homage to that site today and do Noah’s Skull-By-Numbers from the original 365 project. Here it is as he presented it:

So, I took the downloadable pdf that Noah posted into photoshop and filled in all the colors with duotone variations of the ornamental skull that was also in the original year, seen below.

Seems simple enough, right? That’s what I thought, too. But It took awhile to select all the little areas to be filled in, and then when I was adjusting the colors of the pattern, photoshop kept crashing for some reason… grrrrr! So, instead of it taking maybe 30 min, it took about 2 hours. At any rate, here’s the finished product!

As always, click to see it bigger! I think it turned out pretty sweet looking! You were probably like me and thought that it was going to be 2 or more skulls when looking at the original pdf, but Noah used some trickery and fooled us all, because it was just one! But a really neat image at that! He says on the blog how he created this, so I might try my hand at it for one of my projects!

Sorry about that… I’m just so excited!! Starting tomorrow, I’ll get to add a new Category to my posts of Days 101-200! Anyways, for today’s post, I had a very special collaboration with my friend Mason that has been in the works for awhile! Mason saw my version of More Than Words from Day 80 on my facebook and commented that he loved that song and would record it himself if he could sing that high! And I said, “Mason! Let’s do a duet!” And then he told me he could play guitar, so I got extra excited!! We’ve been talking back and forth about this a lot since then, coming up with songs and what-not, but we’ve been unable to find a time to get together! I originally thought that I wanted to have a duet of ours be my 100th post, but we had already given in to the thought that it wouldn’t happen in time. But then, by chance, we happened to both be available tonight, so we did it!!! So! For the song we did Matt Nathanson’s Come On Get Higher! It had a fairly simple guitar part that Mason had already been working on, and good harmony in the chorus! It was a tad low for me, so my voice is a little rough, but I think Mason sounds amazing!!

We had sooooo much fooling around today and we have many, many more duets in the works! I expect Mason to be a frequent contributer to the blog now. (He even has a ukulele!!) Thanks for helping me celebrate 100 days, Mason!

And thanks to all of you, my friends, family, and some people I don’t know who follow my project! Without your support and encouragement, I couldn’t have made it this far and I think you all will help me make it to my year goal! I’m still always open for ideas of any kind, no matter how silly or strange! Your ideas are what keep this project interesting!

I’ve re-counted all the days to where I’m supposed to be at in the blog today and realized that I’m not as far behind as I thought! I’m not sure what happened, but I thought I was 2 days behind today, but I’m only 1!

Anyways, for yesterday’s post, I decided to have some fun with photoshop! This goofy photoshopped image was rainbow themed! Most of the images were found searching for various variations of the words rainbow and neon (besides the unicorn) in google images. The first image I found was sort of a rainbow waterfall that was meant as a desktop pattern. I thought it would be funny to have some mythical creature in this bright setting so I decided on a unicorn . Then I found a girl in a rainbow bright costume, a girl in neon green clothes/hair, some neon mushrooms (that I made multiple copies of and adjusted the color), and a rainbow tree! Enjoy!

Like the last photoshop fun post, I didn’t spend long at all on this, and it definitely doesn’t show off my best ‘shopping skills, but I had fun doing it!

So, I’m a little late on this, considering Mother’s Day was on Sunday and it’s now Wednesday, but things got pretty crazy, so I’m just now getting to this… at any rate, I didn’t see my mom on Mother’s day, but will see her Friday!

Anyways, for my mom I decided to use the other hand casting from Day 66. For this one, I sanded it just like the one for my dad as much as I could with a sanding sponge. I then loosely colored all over it with a yellow prismacolor marker. Next, I drew a musical staff swirling down from the pointer finger to the wrist, getting larger as it went, with a dark gray marker. I wanted to do something musical since my mother is a professor of horn and also leads the family choir at church. I finally decided I would do something from church so I could write the words as well, and I found a site that had one of our Hymnal’s, Wonder Love and Praise, in it. I settled upon Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit because we always have so much fun when we sing it! So, I wrote the soprano and alto part out in a red marker, as well as the lyrics. It was hard to get everything to fit at the smallest part, so the measures are sort of long! Here’s the finished product:

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!! Sorry this is so late… So glad I get to see you Friday!

I had something else completely done and ready for this post, and when I went to make the post, the file was to big to upload. Well, I spent several hours last night and a couple today messing with it and was never able to get it to work, so instead I just recorded 3 more songs quickly acapella… sorry to do the same thing 2 days in a row, but I didn’t really have a choice…

At any rate, the first one is another Alanis Morissette song called Right Through You. This is definitely another one I sing in the shower a lot

The next song is one of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins songs, Zeitgeist. Sometime I would like to learn the guitar chords to this and record it again, but this will do for now. I’ve sung this one on lots of trips in the car.

The last song is Porcelain by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. RHCP is one of my all time favorite bands, and the album Californication will always be significant in my life because it was probably the album that got me through my parents divorce. Porcelain is definitely the most chill song on the album, but it’s just so beautiful with the harmonies that I thought it’d be perfect for singing acapella.

I got another day behind yesterday because of another exam, BUT it’s my last exam of the semester!!!! So hopefully I can get caught up again… at least until my whole family comes for graduation on Friday (BTW I’m not actually technically graduating until this summer, or fall, but I wanted to walk with my class)

Anyways, for day 96 I just decided to sing a few songs acapella. These songs are ones that I usually sing in the car on trips when I lose good radio stations or in the shower . The first one is Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack (or the Fugees) Keep in mind that I did all of these with one take….

The last song I sang is Angel by Sarah McLachlan. I fell in love with this song long before the depressing ASPCA commercial came out and have sung it on a couple of different occasions live. I would say this is my go to song

This party is the only reason I rushed back to Knoxville today! My friend had a Toms Style Your Sole Party! Basically, you order a bunch of plain white or natural pairs of Toms shoes and decorate them! The best part is, as always, Toms will send a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair bought! Anyways, I love Toms shoes, so it didn’t take any convincing for me to come! And I thought it would be so fun to decorate some! I decided to get the natural canvas ones (youth size six is equivalent to women’s size 7 or 7.5 and much cheaper!) because my shoes always get dirty easily. Here they are plain:

I had already decided before I came that I wanted to do some sort of paisley design on mine, but wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to work. I ended up just layering 3 large paisleys on them with different colored fine tip sharpies. Here’s what the ended up looking like!

I added a little swirly thing to the sides.

And it’s hard to see it, but I wrote my webpage for this 365 project on the heels

On my feet!

I think they turned out really awesome! The pictures don’t do justice to how bright the colors are! Everybody else had cool designs, too! I wanted to get pictures of all of them, but by the time I finished, a lot of people left. This pair is a purple zebra print.

And this last pair were the hosts! She (and her boyfriend helped ) drew some trees with little birds and stuff on hers! The branches of the trees on either side of the shoe connected and intertwined on the tops of the shoes.

This was so much fun! I’m glad I rushed back to do it! (Although I had the time wrong and showed up an hour early…)

So, I’ve done quite a bit of traveling this weekend. I left immediately after work on Thursday for Nashville, left fairly early on Friday morning for Atlanta, went to a wedding that was an hour away from ATL in Canton and then back to ATL on Saturday, drove from Atlanta back to Nashville this morning and then (after spending about 40 min. in Nashville), I drove back to Knoxville to make it back in time for a party. WHEW! Just typing it makes me tired… At any rate, I did the majority of the driving for my grandmother and aunt, but I was able to just be a passenger some. When I got those opportunities, I did some sketching! Keep in mind that I only had one pencil (no sharpener) and was in a moving car…

I’ve just gotten back to my aunt and uncle’s condo after the wedding of their oldest son!! Matt has always been like a big brother to me, and I was so happy to see him harry an amazing girl like Clarissa!

Anyways, as our wedding present to them, my sister and I gave them a nicely framed portrait! The frame us the one from a few days ago that I painted, and Katherine paid for, and I decided to do a graphite/charcoal portrait of them! I’m posting this on my phone so I don’t have the original picture, but I will post it later!

The wedding was beautiful as was the bride! I’m so happy for you both! Welcome to the family Clarissa!